April 3, 1892: Ice Cream Puts On Its Sundae Best

1892: A druggist in upstate New York adds a candied cherry and some cherry syrup to two dishes of vanilla ice cream. He and his guest, the local parson, enjoy the concoction so much they name it the Cherry Sunday. A treat is born.

Church treasurer Chester Platt often took Rev. John Scott to confer after Sunday worship at the Platt & Colt drugstore in downtown Ithaca, New York. On this particular Sunday, druggist Platt fancied up a simple dish and started an American tradition.

The new dessert gained instant popularity, and the store was soon selling it in strawberry, pineapple, chocolate and other variations. Students at Ithaca’s Cornell University spread the idea as they returned to their homes around the country. Platt and Colt tried to patent the name Sunday, to no avail, but fruit-syrup manufacturers hedged their bets by changing the spelling to sundae, sundai, sundi and even sondhi.

Documentation for this tale is abundant. The drugstore was advertising the Cherry Sunday for 10 cents (equal to about $2.50 today) in the Ithaca Daily Journal as early as Oct. 5, 1892. The store’s ledger books show it was selling ice cream at the time, that it had the ingredients on hand to create the new taste treat, and that the soda clerk who witnessed the creation was indeed employed there at the time. In fact, Deforest Christiance got a raise just two weeks later … from $2 a week to $4.50 (from $50 to $110 in today’s dough). There’s also 1894 correspondence from a patent attorney on the subject.

Other tales place the origin of the dessert and its spelling in Marshall or Evanston, Illinois, or Manitowoc or Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The story goes that local preachers objected to the serving — and sucking — of fizzy ice cream sodas on the Sabbath, so a local genius merchant just took the soda water out of the confection and, voilà, a sundae that wasn’t too sinful to slurp on a Sunday. Journalist H.L. Mencken reported this as folklore in The American Language in 1919 and 1945.

Two Rivers, Wisconsin, has vigorously pressed its claim that Ed Berners created the first sundae in the ice cream parlor he owned in that town in 1881. The problem with this story is that records show that Berners was only 17 in 1881, and that he was employed in Chicago as a millworker in 1884. Berners did eventually own and operate an ice cream parlor in Two Rivers, but the only attribution of the supposed act of culinary wizardry was his own recollection in a local newspaper article in 1929, some 48 years after the purported event.

As for the origins of the ice cream cone, that’s another story for another ‘dae.